


Frequencies

by glasscaskets



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Eventual hurt/comfort probably, F/M, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Max is oblivious to love, Miscarriage, POV Multiple, Past Abuse, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4716314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You know that ringing in your ears? That 'eeeeeeee'? That's the sound of the ear cells dying. Like their swan song. Once it's gone, you'll never hear that frequency again. Enjoy it while it lasts."<br/>-Children of Men </p><p> </p><p>In which Max sets out for the wilderness, four girls attempt to change the world, and Furiosa is left with the remains of the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Heed the warnings! Much violence, violation, and abuse discussed herein.
> 
> A note on canon: I'm treating the comics as kind of suggestions of canon, so while I borrow heavily from them at times, I'm also just enjoying the ends the movie left loose.

**i. Wasteland**

Clambering off the lift had done something nasty and very possibly irreparable to his leg. He hadn’t thought it through. He didn’t object, necessarily, to being on the lift with Furiosa and the others, except that it was very loud and even more sudden, and people were grabbing and cheering, and the upper reaches of the Citadel, grinding machinery and children painted death-white, beckoned. They were several feet off the group before he had, after checking first to see that Furiosa was standing with relative stability—she was, arm around the red-headed girl in goggles—crouched low and toppled off the lift into the crowd. 

It was worse down there, amongst the teeming people cheering the women on; he’d been rushed forwards in their press of bodies, and it was hot and scraping and more than he really intended to be involved with. Amongst the roar of aimless shouting, the throbbing song of _let them up_ and _Furiosa!_ and _Immorta!_ , he’d caught a whisper in his own ear, close, the one that had been ringing since Furiosa had used him as a gun stand a few nights prior. 

_Max_

_Where are you, Max?_

He whipped around, saw no one facing his way—all eyes were on the wrecked Gigahorse and its cluster of exhausted passengers as they were heaved steadily up off the ground—but he found her face, and she found his, just for a moment. He stopped moving, just for a moment. _Memorize this_ , he thought, though he couldn’t think why, _it’s important._

One eye was swollen shut; her eyebrow was bisected with a developing scab. Her neck and chin were doused in blood; more likely the ugly masked bastard’s than her own. The smears on her forehead were more ambiguous, but he did find himself happy to see that was all on her forehead—the engine grease that had crowned her was gone. He liked that; her face was hers, and she found his eyes and smiled. 

_She’s never smiled at you before_ , breathed a voice in his ear, a new one, cool and clear. This was, he figured, true. 

He nodded up to her. The lift was out of reach now, even as the girls scrambled to help more starving people onboard, and the yelling blended with the sudden rush of water—more water than Max had ever seen at once before—coming from above. To think he was sitting on that all those months in the War Boys’ caves. They all were.

And then he turned, and knew doing it that he’d never see her again, and pressed on through the bellowing crowd. 

By the time he’d cleared the stragglers, the ringing in his ears had long blocked out the sounds of the Citadel. He poked at one, experimentally, but only managed to momentarily bend and muffle the shrill, steady tone in his right ear. Come to think of it, that had been going all day. Probably longer. He took only a moment to try and sort out when he last slept—it was a pointless exercise, on a day like this. He’d slept in the Rig, though, that he knew, because he woke up drowning in hands and she was there, steady at the wheel and having sweat most of the engine grease off of her. 

“It’s okay,” she’d said. “Sleep.” 

His ear had been ringing then too, but he’d heard her clearly, and the way she said _it’s okay_ almost shocked him, _it’s okay_ , he’d never heard such a thing before. _It’s okay_ , as they rumbled through the desert with the War Boy straddling the door they’d lost with the pregnant girl. _It’s okay_ , with his heart punching in his throat and his nails digging under the skin on his palm, locking his fist into place. 

_It’s okay_ , she had said, and told him to get some sleep. He hadn’t. But she told him to. After she told him _it’s okay_ , and the sound of her saying it was like a gift, like a flower petal or something else so rare and soft you couldn’t just leave it in the sand, so he carried it. He remembered her saying it, the way she had done so, as he rode the bike out to meet her and the others on the salt plains—a warm sound to drown out the lilting chorus of _where are you, Max?_ —and he tried to do so again, amongst the distant sound of roaring voices, rushing water, and what sounded like a baby mewling. He wondered how a baby could be heard over all the noise out here.

He was quite a ways from the Citadel before he became aware that some of the noise was following him. Dragging his leg and thinking of little beyond how badly he wanted to lie down, he’d been walking across rumpled, tire-wrecked sand for long enough to feel the beginnings of a sunburn on the back of his neck before he heard the new voice again.

 _You’re never going to see her again_ , it repeated, but he pressed out; he knew that already. _You just left, leaving left left them left them left them._

He shrugged a bit; he didn’t belong there. There was much to be scavenged from the fury road if he was careful. After that, he’d make his way. _Pa._

Sweat fell into his eye. His head and leg were throbbing in what felt like sync; knee-skull-knee-skull. _Leftthemleftthem._ The ache was dulling, but only slightly, and the sweat was running into cuts on his face and arms and making them sting. He’d never gotten around to handling the myriad tiny cuts he’d sustained after he and the War Boy drove through the storm; not to mention all the scrapes and bruises since. The feel of hot metal and leather hadn’t quite left his body; he could close his eyes and still be in the car. _Left them._ Or on top of it.

_Wake up, Pa, wake up._

_I’m up_ , he thought, forcing his eyes open; he was all grit. He remembered the girls, Furiosa’s, in the hose next to the Rig; what he’d give to hold that hose again. He closed his eyes again, just for a moment, to savor the notion of the hose in his hand, the spigot meal cool under his palm, the water filling his mouth and nose and eyes, cold and unfiltered by the muzzle.

_Left them!_

He jumped, found his empty hand curled around an imagined hose at his mouth. Shaking his head again, he pressed on, though the sand seemed to sink further under his weight now. _Don’t sleep now Max!_ someone screeched against the back of his skull; the command bounced around behind his eyes with blunt persistence, and he kept his eyes as wide open as he could get them. They stung, and he thought they might be filling up with sand, and the shouting in his head got fuzzy, with one voice occasionally peeling out of the melee to screech or wail, until suddenly someone grunted, a different sound, and the world crashed back into focus in front of his face.

Dragging scrap and salvage looted from dead cars and bodies—panting and glistening in sweat—a _person_ was in front of him, squinting back at him in confusion that mirrored his own. He knew that man, he thought, but where from—

“Christ, is that my universal donor?”— _better run Max you left them Max you promised Max turn the rig around_ —“Blimey. Last I saw you, boy, you was a hood ornament.” _Max?_

He rocked back, the man’s face and body refocusing in his swimming vision, the voice wriggling into his good ear, a worm that pressed in against the voices in his brain. _Hey careful, that’s the universal donor!_

The tattoo gun man. The one who’d matched him to sick war boys; dug thick, wide needles like shovels under the skin at his collar and neck—again, and again, always the same spots, leaving needles in until infections developed, until no more blood could be wrung from the nasty pulsing piles of weeping tissue; until Max came to expect the grind of needle against bone in his collar, wondered it it was possible that that was happening, then felt sure.

He felt the scrape now, almost heard it, the gaping needle chipping at his bones—in his cage he’d checked constantly, could never confirm what he felt he knew, that he was losing flecks of bone with every unwilling donation, and once spent days or weeks with his hands bound behind him when the Organic Mechanic— _hey careful!_ —caught him picking at the needle mark until something white and green and watery ran down his fingers and his torso— _that’s a universal donor_ —

The Mechanic stepped closer, head cocked like a dog— _Pa-a-a—got a war boy runnin’ on raging feral universal donor hook up c’mon now_ —and Max could see him glinting, the sun hitting the sweat on his forehead and the slickness of his teeth as he opened his mouth again—

—he hadn’t quite decided to do it, but his legs moved, pushing off the sinking sand, scrambling for purchase before he was barreling towards the Mechanic, a cacophony inside his head punctuated briefly with a thud and a grunt as he crashed bodily against him, and there was a furious scrambling and fingernails and palms on his face and shoulders and his blood grew unbearably loud against the inside of his skull before his leg gave one last vicious twitch, and they fell together into the sand—

_hey careful! that’s the universal donor!_

—they landed shoulder to shoulder, and he felt his arm crumple under their combined weight before an elbow caught him in the jaw, and his face was down in the sand and his mouth and eyes were filling up—

_help raging help us raging feral got a war boy running on_

—he kicked, scrambled, jerked both shoulders in one fluid motion and the man on his back clung like a bug before he tumbled, and Max moved fast, writhed, _where are you Max_ , until his foot found leverage and his knee found something soft and he pushed, hard, _help me Max!_ and the Mechanic howled as Max realized his knee was in the man’s groin, _hey careful!_ , and he waited for his vision to clear and for the hands—too many hands—to stop clawing his face backwards and in the meantime dug his knee in further until his palm found earth and he pushed himself up and over and then he was upright, one knee up against the squirming Mechanic’s groin and the other jolted forward, awkward, on his sternum, holding him down.

The Mechanic went to punch him and Max lunged, caught both wrists, and pressed them hard into the ground. 

_Max? Where are you?_

He shook his head, cleared it as best he could of phantom hands and ringing shrieks, and found the sound of his own heartbeat, his own breathing, and the Mechanic’s swearing. He cast his eyes around around, followed the Mechanic’s scrambling fingers under his own bloody, heavy hands, saw a steering wheel dropped in the sand.

He knew it, too—it was the one he’d yanked out of the Bullet Farmer’s car, the one he’d given to the little War Boy. It had been in the Rig.

_Blood bag!_

He seized it and dashed it, hard, across the Mechanic’s doughy face, watched a gratifying spray of blood chase the sound of a nose crunching into the air and sand. 

The wind cut across his face then, cool where he was coated in sweat, and he suddenly remembered the night before, the cool smell of salt settling into his hair and skin as he pricked away at his map. After he told her he wouldn’t come across the plains. _Pa?_

Behind him, perched on a bike, an old woman with a carpet bag had sat talking to one of Furiosa’s girls, the tallest one, and their voices carried across the briny breeze. “How long till the baby comes?” the old woman had asked, and the words snagged in Max’s ear, twisted his head their way. He thought the baby—the girl with the baby—fell off the rig. He knew. She’d gone under—he could see her sweet face obscured beneath a bloom of blood, _turn the rig around!_ , knew she’d been flattened and crushed into the dirt.

“Long time,” the other girl had said, and Max found them in the dark, twin heads ducked together, shining white hair. “Eight months, I think. He said I was only four weeks along.” 

“He?”

“Yeah. Organic Mechanic. One’ve Joe’s—he did our inspections.” 

_raging feral_

“Joe the dad?”

The girl huffed then, almost a laugh—“Yeah, Joe’s the dad.”

“This Mechanic any good? He keep you girls healthy?”

A long silence then, and fidgeting, something rattling. Max stole a glance over at the silhouettes on the bike. The girl had something in her long fingers, shook it, and the rattling floated back across the sand to Max again, and then her voice, “Yeah. Healthy. Him too. ‘Per’aps a dose of some-fing, Joe? ’Elp yeh stay up aaaaaaall night?’” 

The old woman made a noise of disgust, and Max turned to watch the women more carefully. He recognized the voice now, with the girl performing it in an exaggerated drawl— _raging feral, better muzzle ’im_ —and the girl kept talking, her voice a little thicker, “‘Lie on yer backs an’ let _daddy_ ’ave ’is fill.’ Day he told me I was—” 

She stopped, and Max found himself rigid with his jaw set, the feeling of the needle on his bones back like an insistent itch, the memory of the Mechanic’s ugly mouth and beady eyes, the image of these soft clean girls, unwrapped, pushed down and subjected to—

“Gonna be a real ugly baby.”

“Nah,” said the old woman, and as Max watched she took the rattling jar back from the girl, set it into the bag between them. “She’s gonna be a beauty.”

Beneath him, under the insistent heat, the Mechanic’s nose whistled with every ragged breath, and the clear voice sang in his ear again, _you left them_. The old woman promising a beautiful baby—Max could almost imagine such a thing, but the vision was hazy, clouded with red and dirt—she had been left behind, he’d seen her dead in the Rig’s passenger seat, neck neatly divided under a blade he hadn’t seen. But the girl had lived, she’d been on the lift with the others, that bag still folded in her arms. Brave girl. 

_You left them blood bag!_

“Listen,” the Mechanic wheezed.

Max tilted his head, looked down at the face beneath him. The shining teeth. The steering wheel, ringed in bullets, slipped in his sweating hand. He tightened his grip, angled his wrist, examined the rusty metal skull that decorated the wheel’s center, the dangling hard teeth grinning up at him. He gave a satisfied grunt.

“Listen, universal,” said the Mechanic.

“No,” said Max, and he bashed he center of the steering wheel hard into the Mechanic’s temple. The man roared and the ugly metal teeth latched, pulled skin, and when Max yanked the wheel back towards himself blood gushed into the sand. Max brought the wheel down again, and again, saw teeth sprinkle into the sand, and kept at hitting until the head stopped feeling solid under his blows.

Silence settled, his blood sloshing at his ears again, and a voice on the wind drew his eyes up.

_Max? Where are you?_

He tossed the steering wheel aside, pulled his knee from the sweaty well between the Mechanic’s legs, and heaved himself to his feet. 

_Max_

He didn’t want to root through the dead man’s supplies; he had enough to go on, he decided, and with his skull echoing heavy on his neck and his eyes stinging against the salt he thought he smelled in the air, he walked on.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As previously noted, I'm playing fast and loose with comics canon and just making it up as I go. Writing Toast is a joy that I recommend to all.
> 
> Please heed the warnings!

**II. Citadel**

People come and they go; this is something Toast has known all her life. You don’t have to love someone to miss them, or miss them to love them. But weeping for ghosts, or what-could-have-beens, that never felt real or right. When Cheedo used to get dramatic and cry for her father, Toast found it hard to stomach; even worse when Angharad did it for her mother . When Capable wrung her hands and worried her braids and fussed for the fate of her brothers—what did it matter? Toast always wanted to snap at them, because so _what_. Cheedo’s father was _dead_ ; Angharad’s mother too. Capable’s brothers probably couldn’t remember her. Only the Dag was silent in these weeping hours. Toast hated it.

Toast’s own mother was no one, a copper-colored jaw she could peered over, the shadow of a face set against the sun in her oldest memories. She was dead, Toast knew, though who had told her, or when, was lost to her; what she knew clearly was what mattered, what she could touch, what she could change. The Citadel. The War Boys’ ceaseless drums, and Pups squealing out of sight. The Dag at the piano, delicate and lilting even when she was straying wildly from Miss Giddy’s faithfully preserved paper tunes. Angharad’s swelling belly, a thumb-sized bruise on the underside of Capable’s wrist, Toast’s own hair, course and the color of scorched sand, in piles on the floor when she cut it off while the others slept, two days after Bulan spilled her third unfinished baby in slick, hemorrhaging clots, piece by piece staining the sheets. Miss Giddy threw those sheets away, kept Bulan under her arm until the Mechanic and Joe came back that afternoon. 

Bulan begged to kiss them all goodbye, but Toast was glad Joe didn’t let her. They weren’t really sisters, or family, no matter what Capable and Angharad and Miss Giddy said. They were just there, in this _room_ together. And Bulan would be dead by morning, Toast figured; what was there to be gained in kissing cheeks like she was going traveling?

Toast liked to call things by name, and when Capable asked her why she’d cut such beautiful hair off, Toast said, “Because it’s pretty.” 

He’d pressed his thumbs and forearm against her windpipe for it, and she kept her chin up all week, showed the others her necklace of bruises, because he couldn’t make the hair grow back, no matter what he did. 

The first night Cheedo arrived, she slept with the Dag, as they were closest in age, and Bulan’s old bed was still stripped bare, the mattress stained in ominous rust. Cheedo never got her own bed. 

Cheedo was a dreamer. Toast never knew what to say, when Cheedo bent her face close to glossy illustrations of mountaintops and _snow_ , which Miss Giddy explained to her was different from fallout while Cheedo’s eyes went wide. What good were pictures here? Dreaming, Toast had known since long before she was told she’d be a bride, was empty.

Until she met Furiosa. She couldn’t touch the lush grass and plump fruits that grew at Furiosa’s, then Angharad’s, Green Place, and she didn’t need to, because Furiosa was going there. Furiosa, with engine grease turning her face into a shadow, her eyes calculating, her body half machine, her pity as complete and uncompromised as her anger. Furiosa, who told Angharad not to paint such pretty pictures of the world outside their cool, soft home. Furiosa, who showed Capable how to tie strong knots when she asked, who never let Cheedo’s dreams wander further than what could be packed into a War Rig. Who everyone looked to with respect. Miss Giddy, Angharad, Joe. 

It was the books that did it. 

On the day Toast found, with shuddering relief, that she was bleeding for the month, Angharad found a torn corner of paper in her pillowcase. The paper came from a book of Miss Giddy’s; it took Angharad four days to find it, in part as she confided in no one. The paper matched a page at last, and Angharad found within it a single sheet of yellowed paper, covered, in cramped slanted writing and hasty, workmanlike diagrams: a short treatise on guns and ammo. 

At that point Angharad told Capable, who told Toast, of her discovery, and Toast felt something like love. 

For the following weeks of covert planning, of small discoveries and heart pounding triumph in many forms—matching corners to pages, screws to furniture with hidden compartments, strings to rugs with more hurried letters beneath them, another’s month of blood staining her thighs—Toast came to see Furiosa as everything she’d ever wanted to be. She was brave. She was fast. She was smart. She was ruthless and she was respected. She was unsentimental, and she was going to take them away. 

This, Toast realized, was someone she could not bear to see go. 

And so it was with some measure of odd disappointment that Toast learned, once Capable and the others who came to help the Imperator heal started letting Furiosa out of bed for more than a few moments, that she’d gone a little soft. 

“Soft” was, in fairness, far too strong a term for a woman who tried to get up and help examine Joe’s irrigation system within twenty-four hours of being stabbed twice. But the point stood: Furiosa missed the crazy man. Max. 

It was Cheedo who said so; Toast wouldn’t have called it that. But while Toast was perched atop a wobbling guard rail, inspecting some piping, Cheedo appeared from nowhere at her side and said, “Furiosa misses Max.”

Toast bumped her head on a pipe turning to look who was there, and a clatter of rust came loose and hit the floor. “Who did what?”

Cheedo sighed, and offered Toast a slightly dirty glass bottle full of water. She’d been out in the Dag’s garden again. Toast took it gratefully; it was cold enough to leave condensation on the outside.

“Furiosa,” she said, patiently, as if Toast was small, “misses Max.” 

Toast wiped her mouth and brought the now half-empty bottle to her forehead, letting the cold overwhelm her a little. “Did she say that?”

“No. But she does. I do, too.” 

“Do what?” 

“Miss Max.” 

Toast stopped to consider this. It seemed a little ridiculous, but then, Cheedo loved everyone. Cheedo felt bad for Joe's son Corpus and Cheedo kissed War Pup’s cheeks. 

“What’s to miss?”

This was harsher than she meant it, and she did feel sorry when Cheedo’s face betrayed a sting of hurt. Max—a name she, huddled in the front seat with her face stinging and throbbing while one of the Many Mothers drove for her, the heavy smell of Joe—and Joe’s blood—still thick around her face, had missed the telling of—was a good man, all told. He was impressive, and he saved Furiosa, and he helped them without a damn thing in it for himself. He was practical and weird and she didn’t mind him, much, but she didn’t feel she knew him enough to miss him.

“There’s plenty to miss,” said Cheedo, petulant, “and Furiosa misses him.” 

Once Cheedo said it, Toast started to look for it. As Furiosa’s lungs become heartier and she can walk further without catching her chest, as her new prosthetic went through fittings and adjustments until she looked more like her old self, sans face shadowed in engine grease, Toast watched for signs of pining, of loss. She didn’t find them, though—Furiosa was as straight-spined as ever, patient and steady, straightforward, herself. She ceded most of the practical duty of running the Citadel to others, respectful War Boys and gnarled, sunburnt people from below that none who lived in the Citadel’s higher reaches could have conceived of, to the last of the Mothers, to Capable. But she was there, ever the steady-on-soldier, and she leant her advice whenever it was sought.

“Furiosa,” Toast said one morning, crouched low in the garden inspecting something hard and red and round that the Dag had primly informed her was a _cherry tomato_ , “does she. Is she sad, ’cause Max left?”

The Dag, whose belly was beginning to curve with unexpected elegance outward from her gawky form, tilted her head at Toast, put a fingernail in her mouth and chewed a bit. “He was never gonna stop being insane,” she offered, and dropped without ceremony to her knees to do some weeding. Toast looked at her for a long moment. From this angle, the belly looked weirder, pressed against the Dag’s thighs and unyielding. 

“Exactly,” she said, though she hadn’t thought of it quite in those terms. But he wasn’t. Probably. With sudden clarity, Toast remembered the way Angharad gathered safety pins and sewing needles and shards of everything that broke, hid them in pockets so she could keep picking at the scarred-up patches on her face no matter how many times Miss Giddy took her instruments away, no matter how long Capable held her hands and tucked her chin over the crown of Angharad’s head. Toast doubted such things could be undone. 

“But,” the Dag continued, her eyes focused on the soil, “she did like him. And she hasn’t liked many people, has she?” 

Toast sucked her teeth.

That night, as they were sitting up alone under scratchy blankets, Capable playing with a lantern as they shared a stark white carrot, Capable nudged Toast’s calf with her toe.

“Why does it bother you so much?” she asked without preamble.

“Wha’?” Toast grunted back, showing her mouthful of carrot just to make Capable frown at her. She dug her toe into Toast’s leg again. Toast makes a noise and the pieces of carrot fall out of her mouth; Capable laughs that she’s disgusting and they kick each other for a minute before Capable stretches out on her back, balancing the lantern on her stomach with both hands cupped around the base.

“Furiosa and Max,” she said, into the quiet. “Cheedo said you’re being all…you about it.” 

“What’s that mean?” Toast turned on her rear to look at Capable, who was watching the sky.

“You know. Just. _You_ , about it. She can miss him without being his wife.”

Toast considered elbowing Capable in the collarbone, but upon weighing the fire risk decided to just suck her teeth at her instead. 

“I know that,” she said, flushing a little, because she hated that Capable could think her so bruisable and transparent. And that wasn’t it, mostly. 

“I think he should have stayed,” Capable said, letting it go, “mostly because his damn head was bleeding. Not to mention he’d just given her a pint. A body’s just a car, it can only run on fumes so long.” 

Toast drew her knees up and considered this. She didn’t want him dead in the desert. She thought everyone probably knew that. 

“Furiosa can’t be just ours, I suppose,” Capable added, voice a little more distant, and Toast nodded, set her cheek on her knee, watched Capable’s flame. Capable, she figured, knew you couldn’t keep people for yourself. 

“She’s nobody’s,” said Toast, voice a little harder than she meant.

“Of _course_ not,” said Capable.

And so, around the time the Dag first woke them shrieking in a combination of revulsion and excitement that _it’s moving it’s moving I feel her moving!_ , Toast swallowed her strange sore uneasiness when Furiosa said she was going to go out and scout a bit, maybe bring in some stragglers. 

She thought of what Cheedo had said, when last they discussed the matter, weeks before, when Cheedo had once again said she missed Max. “He protected us,” she said, stubborn, hugging herself. “I miss him.” 

When Toast said nothing back, Cheedo had added, “And he _liked_ us.” 

Toast thought of the way he rolled his eyes when she tried to rile him up, before they found the Many Mothers, the way he stayed in the cab when they did find them, the map he made them and the way he’d dumped Joe’s body from the top of the Gigahorse, disgusted, silent. He had liked them. 

“Do you miss him, ever?” Cheedo had asked. Toast wanted to ignore the question; Cheedo missed everyone. Cheedo missed people she hadn’t seen in years, people she’d known for hours. Cheedo missed people whose names she never knew. Cheedo missed Angharad’s baby, who was never born, and Bulan, who she never met. 

Toast didn’t really miss anyone. Toast focused, always, on what she could hold with her own hands.

She set a hand on Cheedo’s skinny shoulder, considered squeezing it but found she liked it where it was, a little wire. They would never be family, no matter what Angharad had said, but perhaps brothers in arms. 

Furiosa left in the morning, having patiently tolerated Capable rewrapping her chest and Cheedo placing a rushed, self-conscious kiss on her cheek. Toast wished her luck.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, playing pretty fast and loose with canon...
> 
> Heed the warnings! And enjoy. :)

**III. Between**

 

Only a man who didn’t know her well would ever call Furiosa impatient. She was direct, she was unyielding, she was assertive; she was not impatient. The units of War Boys she’d trained, her crews on any rig or pursuit vehicle, even the Black Thumbs she used to supervise way back in the day, they’d all tell you—gentle, no, but patient, always. A job well done was worth waiting on. 

But she wasn’t patient now. She wanted her ribs to stop cinching painfully with each breath; she wanted her sides to stop radiating warm, pulsing pain that built from a snug loop around her torso to a fire she couldn’t muddle through. She wanted her face to stop being swollen, she wanted her legs to shake less, and she wanted her lungs to stop spluttering like wasted engines. 

But, as someone had told her, many, many days ago, wanting is not the same thing as having. 

And so she lay tortuously still, walked only with someone to lean on, ate in tiny portions meant to keep a stomach placid; she breathed slowly, and to Capable’s steady count, with a straight back anchored by Capable’s patient hand. She waited, and wobbled, and got better, because she was patient, but the slowness of it was agony, like a burn inflicted by degrees, heat to each individual skin cell until it blistered and burst.

It was hot, she knew, outside, where her girls and the last of the Vuvalini met in sparse shade with anyone who was willing to help them fix the world. She knew this because Toast told her, for she was in the Vault, air-conditioned— _air-conditioned!_ —and bored, languishing on the bed that was once Angharad’s, healing torturously slowly.

The hours alone with her thoughts and the books stockpiled by old Miss Giddy didn’t suit her, and it was the stillest she’d been in decades. She had been moving for seven thousand days, and she didn’t know how to restart the count. She carried on, guessing now, as she had been for years—she was missing days, she knew, when the Dag arrived with a slightly protruding belly. _When did that happen?_

It used to be, she was only still when she slept, and she made a point to be exhausted by then. She’d spend that five minute twilight thinking, sketching, imagining how she might leave this place for good. It used to be just aimless thoughts, a sprint out into the desert, disappearing into the mountains and emerging, muddy and tired but whole, at the Green Place. In the earliest days, her mother usually awaited her, somehow, in perfect condition, rosy-cheeked and sitting in lush grass, happy to see her.

That dream died quickly, but the hope of escape never did, and as she grew older the imagined liberation grew more complex, more tangible, though never more tangible; the Wretched could leave, if they were stupid enough to, but anyone working in the caves was kept on a short leash. 

The third time she was caught trying to ride out on a supply run, hanging onto the rusty bottom of a truck, she was hit across the cheek with a wrench by her supervisor down in the garages. She’d made it less than four minutes. He told her she was lucky not to have gone under the wheels.

“Don’t try that stupid shit,” he warned her, face close to hers, as she cupped her throbbing cheek and tried to think around the ringing pain. Through the tears streaming down her face, she could see his nose an inch from hers, sweat cutting lines in the grease and dirt the coated him. “Out there? Nothing but fucking dirt.” 

She appreciated that he didn’t tell anyone what she’d done, and she knew that was probably the only luck life intended to afford her. She devoted herself wholly to knowing the cars backwards and forwards, because the cars were freedom. They were also easy to understand, they were fixable. She liked them, and as she got stronger but stayed wiry, she became one of the foreman’s favorites, and she and five or so other young Black Thumbs were routinely drawn aside to follow him out to work on the big stuff, the rigs and the pursuit vehicles, the Gigahorse once. 

Around that time, as the daylight waned and they were all thoroughly bathed in grease and sweat, the mechanic who’d once nearly broken her cheekbone, the same who had designed her metal arm, gave a shout to the room at large about finding a War Boy to show them have to shave their damn faces.

“You look like rotting potatoes, the lot of you. Get rid of it.” 

She’d brought a hand to her face, cupped her chin and run a palm over the slope of her jaw; it felt no rougher than usual, grubby but not, she would have thought, noticeable by sight. 

The mechanic burst out laughing. “Not you, girlie,” he said, “you are just fine as you are.” 

She never let her hair grow long enough to be moved by a breeze after that; she was as meticulous about keeping it shaved as the War Boys. She started training little Black Thumb War Pups, and they never wanted to stay down in the garages; they wanted to be War Boys, every one. When she’d talked three seasons of nimble-fingered little ones through the finer points of engine tuning, she looked at her own hands, no longer quite so small, and decided she wanted to be driving the cars, not operating them. Why, she explained to herself as she fell asleep at night, dwell down below with sick cars, when you could be in the sun with the healthy ones?

The healthy ones left. They went east. They went towards _home_. 

Her intense knowledge of the cars smoothed her transition, and she was trusted as a lancer sooner than she’d expect. Out in the sun, she was singularly focused, she was a perfect machine; it was only in bed, sun sick and flattened with exhaustion, that she dreamed on getting out.

They gave her War Boys to train. Then they let her decide what training should consist of. She was given tactical decisions to make. She was healthier than most, agile, smart, and driven at all times to work the hardest, to exhaust herself, to finish another day that stood between her and escape. She didn’t rise through the ranks, really; they just rose around her. Her crew liked her; an Imperator like that inspires loyalty, they said. She met with Immortan Joe, in her capacity as a colonel in his army, as someone permitted to speak and who was listened to. She was iron; she did what was asked of her without complaint or misstep. She was a machine, greased well and engine thrumming just right, ready to rev, a steady pace. 

Every night, though, she revised the escape plan born all those years ago, with _run_. 

She was given control of the War Rig, and she came the closest to crying she had in almost six thousand days.

The plan began to take shape, left the page, stopped being sketches, grew edges, a texture; it was real. She could leave. She had a War Rig. She was the best sharp shooter in the Citadel. She had Buzzards and Ruskis and every time of sand-dweller in her pocket; she had leverage. She could go. She could _go_. 

And then one day, she was asked to guard the Vault. Only from the outside, but she’d known Miss Giddy for years, and seeing her step out from behind Immortan’s safe door. She knew what was in there—everyone did—but neither she nor Miss Giddy, apparently, were ready to be so nakedly complacent in what went on.

Miss Giddy smiled at her. “Little Furiosa,” she said, “you grew.”

“Is he good to them?” she asked, her eyes on her own hands, filthy and still nimble, wrapped around the rifle she kept for show. 

There was a long silence. Miss Giddy was barefoot, and the sight made Furiosa herself feel oddly exposed, a stranger in the world Miss Giddy occupied, a stranger to the little girl Miss Giddy had known her as once. Guarding the door so the Wives—the _breeders_ —and here was old Miss Giddy, barefoot, watching her. 

Furiosa remembered being very small, impossibly small, a large hand on the back of her head, being shoved down and held firm so a brand could be pressed into her neck, being kicked for crying; she remembered picking a shard of tooth from her knuckle after some anonymous shape that stunk like mud and sweat tried to unravel her shirt off of her; remembered filthy thumbs on her jaw and in her mouth and an approving grunt as someone grasped her breasts and held them like he was trying to guess their weight. She’d slept, for over a year, with her hands cupped and clenched hard between her thighs, and hoped it would be enough, having the treachery of a body that exposed her like a nerve. And she was, she knew, one of the lucky ones around here. 

_Is he good to them?_ She felt sick.

“The oldest is having a baby,” said Miss Giddy, instead of answering. 

“When?”

“She’s only a girl herself. Only began to bleed a few years ago. She was already here.” 

Furiosa swallowed, remembering the day she awoke to find the hand between her legs dusted in dry blood like rust. It had only been a year since she’d thought she had to shave her face, but she’d known, by then, what it meant. Her throat felt scraped and dry.

“Goodnight, dear,” said Miss Giddy, and she left, leaving Furiosa with both hands still on her gun, her tongue feeling swollen in her mouth.

That night, she took longer to fall asleep than she had in years. For hours, she lay perfectly still, thinking of her rig, her home, her plans. Mapping and planning, as vague and rosy as her bygone dreams of a living mother. By the next full moon, she’d secured a post inside the Vault. And then she met Angharad. 

Laying still now, in the ghostly Vault and in Angharad’s sheets, was the longest she’d lain still in so long. She remembered slipping notes to Angharad, laying plans, forcing her idle, aimless plans to lurch towards something real. Once she’d tempted the girls—frowning Toast, who watched her every move, little Cheedo, sweet-faced Capable, unflinching Angharad, the Dag, with her long fingers in her mouth—she couldn’t let it collapse again. She couldn’t afford a moment’s more delay. And she had the rig. 

Angharad was gone, now, and she wouldn’t ever quite breathe easy for it. It was Max, what seemed like years before he carried her onto the Gigahorse’s hood, who saw it. Saw something. A body, four wheels. It was easy math out there.

Max, who sidled in quietly to join Angharad and Valkyrie and Ace and everything else she left on the road.

Max, who would not leave her head.

He left, she thought, because this wasn’t his world—the Citadel was no paradise to the girls or to her, but to Max it was only ever a cage, and she knew, quite without being told, that he could not abide by cages. The animal ferocity with which he filed the muzzle off his face spoke plenty to that. 

He left, she thought, because it wasn’t his war, and he’d given enough—more than enough—already to their cause. He had his own place to be, somewhere out beyond what she could see. He knew the salt plains well enough, and chased her across them—he was a man of action.

He left, she thought, and that was that.

But—he left with his skull and face still rubbed raw from the muzzle, the tube he used to give her his blood—his _blood_ —still coiled on his shoulder. He left as if he hadn’t just been holding her up; as if she hadn’t spent the drive back to the Citadel flitting in and out of awareness with his body there always to steady her.

She steadied herself; she always had. 

But nonetheless, he wouldn’t leave her head, and his leaving wouldn’t either. She worried for him. She wanted to talk to him. She realized, like a bolt from blue, that she missed him. 

She hadn’t missed a soul since her mother, and that wound had scarred over even before the brand on the back of her neck did. But she missed him. Her, with him at her side—it had felt powerfully, eminently right. 

Her impatience redoubled. She wanted to be better. Capable preached patience. The Dag told her to stop before she started coughing up blood and nasty yellow stuff again. 

“I know you don’t remember that,” she’d added reproachfully, at Furiosa’s cocked eyebrow, “but I do. You weren’t breathing right, and you choked on the yellow stuff.”

Cheedo fussed over her and Toast dispassionately updated her on the goings on outside of the Vault. 

“You know, you don’t have to listen to Capable,” she added, a hint of a conspiratorial grin appearing on her face. “You can get up whenever you want to.” 

She suspected Toast would not have been so generous if she knew the itch Furiosa felt to get out of bed was rooted more in a desire to be on the move again and more to go out and try to find Max the madman.


End file.
